


By Force If Necessary

by we_built_the_shadows_here



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-04-03 23:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14007483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/we_built_the_shadows_here/pseuds/we_built_the_shadows_here
Summary: The Force always seeks balance. Rey is the light that has risen to meet the darkness in Kylo Ren.If Ben Solo cannot be turned to the light of his own free will, can he be dragged?





	1. 1

The days on the desert planet of Jakku are brutally hot, but with no plant life or cloud cover to keep that heat close to the ground, the nights are equally frozen. Rey grew up inside of an AT-AT, and on especially cold nights she would wake huddled to a wall of plastic or blackened ceramic that had retained the heat conducted through the metal from the day longer than the rest. Even now that she hasn't woken up on Jakku in a month, her body remembers, and in her sleep, she pushes herself close to walls, close to warmth.

Which is how she wakes now: huddled by force of animal instinct and habit against something solid and warm.

It's the scar she sees first as she surfaces slowly into wakefulness, that savage puckered line of hurt she placed there, splitting the handsome face. There's no regret to spare for it, not in the sea of other regrets. And then the nose: long, royal, nothing like her own face. The mouth, soft, his breath on her finger tips curled next to her face, long lashes brushing his cheeks--

Dark eyes open before hers, and there's half a moment of guileless surprise, something almost tender. 

And then: Shock. Anger. Betrayal.

And then he's gone, as if he never was. It's hard to tell who cut the thread; herself, in fear, or him, in the rage she can almost taste on the back of her tongue. He leaves behind a starburst of black paneling from the inside of--wherever he is--like an afterimage of staring into a bright light. But even that fades.

After all the bonhomie, after all the happy reunions, once successful and joyous escape settles into monotony, Rey would almost believe it a dream if it didn't happen again. That night, settling down, he's there; half an arm, a shoulder sprawled across a bunk, an unfamiliar and very fine sheet coiled in her bedding. She tries to shut him out, but she wakes to a sudden shift in the air and a sense that a great warmth has just abandoned her. Every night. Worse, it begins to happen while they are both awake. Out of the corner of her eye, down a hall that twists away from her, panels of the Falcon gone glossy black: he's turned away, delivering orders, and he only glances. His brow goes furrowed and disappears, but the hall remains twisted,  _ wrong _ . Glancing up from the Jedi texts, she sees him, eyes also bent to a book--a  _ real _ book, not a datacard but a physical object of milled tree pulp, just like her--before they flicker up. He's everywhere, and it's intolerable, and it has to be solved. 

That's what has driven her to the ancient Jedi texts in the first place, which she cannot read (what need has there ever been for a filthy junkrat to read anything but part numbers and inscriptions in Auberesh?) and, once she manages to get the text read to her by the fussy gold droid, they are so dreary and dull that they do a fine job of keeping him out. The Falcon around her may twist, go dark, be haunted by a ship that looks both utterly alien and too-familiar, but  _ Ben _ stays away. Whether this is her effort or his, she cannot say.

Day after day the Falcon hops from location to location, ahead of pursuit, picking up and discharging passengers and escorts, a thousand and one clattering minds. Rey reads, she tries to meditate, and she can shut them all out but one. The world around her flickers dark with his roiling presence. His scarred face. Starbursts of the ships he leaves behind spreading like contagion. Once, an entire hallway carpeted with scorched grass that she recognizes from their most recent stopover, and footprints.  _ His _ footprints.

The texts say to meditate. To let go of herself, her identity, her hates and her wants--the only way to truly connect with the Light. So she meditates, lets the Force flow through her. But the jagged wound of Ben Solo is slices right through everything, like the event horizon of a black hole.

By the seventh day she knows she will never be a Jedi. Not like this. Not with Ben Solo anchored to her, tying her hands and arresting her thoughts and infiltrating her dreams with his own. Luke was right. There is too much darkness in him and, now, in her, flowing through their connection.

It's a problem with no solution that she can find, a problem she can't even discuss for fear of exile, of abandonment, of being labeled a traitor. There's no answers anywhere except the worst one, the one that has been sitting there like a stone on her mind since before he killed Snoke, the one question the texts threaten to answer in the worst possible way:

There is balance. The Force always seeks balance. She is the light that has risen to meet the darkness in him. If Ben Solo cannot be turned to the light of his own free will, can he be dragged?

\--

Finding a private moment with Leia is difficult aboard the wildly overcrowded Millenium Falcon, but Rey manages it. There's enough deference for the General to clear a swath, and enough awe for the last of the Jedi to give some private space.

"General," she says, mimicking the honorific she's seen.

"Don't start with that." The General is irritable, and whether it's this ship full of memories or the tight quarters or the loss of her brother making her prickly, she has no patience. "Get to your point. You've been lurking around and trying to corner me like you're guilty about something for the past week."

It's hard not to look guilty with the face of her son looking over her shoulder every time she loses concentration enough to block him out, when she wakes every morning with his breath on the nape of her neck, his eyelashes fluttering as his eyes open against her shoulder, his  _ hands _ \--

"If there was a way to save Ben, would you have me do it?"

It's not what the general was expecting, that much is clear. "Explain,” she says, and it comes out like an order.

"I don't know. I still don't understand the Force. I've been studying the books, but--"

Leia cuts her off with a wave. "I never trained either. That was Luke’s specialty. Mine is this. What do you have?"

Too much. Not enough. Everything of him and nothing of use, and the truth would earn her a denial and probably a prison cell. Or worse. "I think there's a way to turn him with the Force. He’s conflicted, I can feel it."

"Still?" Leia rubs her thumb across her chin. "I had thought his choice was made by now."

"His might be, but mine isn't."

The look Leia gives Rey reminds her the General may be a dignitary and may not be young, but she still knows how to handle a blaster. It's not a sure thing that the broken lightsaber Rey still carries wouldn't fly to her hand over Rey’s, were it whole. "And what do you mean by that?"

“Jedi have turned the tide of wars before.”

“They have. That’s why we need you. Here.”

Rey shakes her head. "He's more trained than me, more skilled." It's the same argument she used on Luke, but she doesn't need to know that. "If I can turn him--"

"That's a big if." The General's dry laugh is empty of hope. "I hope you have something better than 'pretty please' in mind?"

"I do." Persuasion is impossible, a closed path, and Rey isn't so foolish to think it can be reopened. "It might not work. But I'm not trained, Luke didn’t give me anything, I can't make enough of a difference. But if I could turn the Supreme Leader of the First Order..."

Leia has hope, but she isn’t stupid. She won’t be suckered. "And what is it, exactly? What do you think you can do?"

The light behind Leia flickers. Goes bright, then dark, then solid. A single eye, shuttering, blossoming into the familiar face. Rey blinks, looks away from it. “On Ach-To, there was incredible light and incredible darkness. The texts don’t tell me enough alone. I might be able to use the power there.”

“Luke couldn’t reach him, and he spent the last years of his life on that planet with those texts.” Leia shakes her head, bitter mourning in her voice. “You don’t have anything he didn’t. No, Rey.”

It’s a harsh truth. Rey closes her eyes, and meets it with her own. “You’re wrong.” She swallows. “He cut himself off from the Force. He didn’t know Han was dead until I told him.”

For the first time in the entirety of their acquaintance, Leia looks old. She sits like an old woman at the washtub preparing to scrub parts for trade on Jakku; spine aching, defeat in her eyes. She doesn’t meet Rey’s eyes when she finally says, “I didn’t know.”

“He would have come, if he had. He would have felt it the same way--the same way you did.” The same way Rey herself still did. “He gave up. On Ben. On the war. On you.” Rey draws herself up, trying to project competence, confidence, her place in the galaxy--everything she is not. “I won’t.”

Leia’s gaze comes up to scan the girl as if seeing her for the first time, and then she laughs. It’s a low, throaty, mirthless sound. “And what do you have that Luke didn’t?”

The connection, of course. But she can’t say it. “I’m stronger than Luke was.”

“You’re not.” Her voice is harsh and true. “Even you would have heard the stories about Darth Vader.”

She has. Enough of them, anyway, old renegades and fugitives and loyalists alike, all in terror. And the spectre of the man in black haunts Ben’s dreams. “There’s a way. I know the Force.”

“Better than I do, sure. Better than my son? How do I know he won't turn you?”

“I can’t explain it any better than that.” She says the only true thing, the only thing she really has. “I know Kylo Ren.” And then: “I know Ben.”

Leia looks to the floor, then the bulkhead, then further, through it all, as if trying to glimpse her son again at a great distance.

"Kylo Ren has taken everything from me," she says quietly, not meeting Rey's eyes. "My brother. My husband. My only child." Her grief is an open wound and it fills up the room with silt for one breathless instant. "Even after he slaughtered those children, I hoped." The older woman shakes her head. "But every time I sense him now, it's nothing but darkness."

Rey knows. Rey has felt it too; the power, the rage, the pit of darkness that still calls, that still looks at her through those black eyes if one of them grows negligent. "But if there was a way," Rey presses. “If I had a way. It wouldn’t be easy, but--”

"As a general, or as a mother?" Leia finally looks back, focusing back on Rey once more, and there is a shard of pain there, a tiny fragment of fire catching light. "As a general, I would say there are many sacrifices I would make to defeat our greatest enemy. By any means necessary. As a mother--" she shakes her head. "I don't think it's possible. But I would still give anything to have my son back."

_ Anything. _

That answers all the rest of the questions she could possibly have. 

"I need to go back to Ach-to. It has to be in secret. The texts have shown me--"

"Why in secret?"

Because you'd all stop me. Because it's insane. "The First Order didn't just want to hunt down Luke for who he was. The texts have power, power I might be able to harness. I can study them on Ach-to, at the first Jedi temple. I can't here, there's too much--" Rey swallows; the lie is rehearsed in the mirror but it's still awful. "Luke said I was powerful. Snoke agreed, enough to try to pull me to his side, but I don't know how to use it yet. I still don't know anything about my place in the Force. I don't know how to use my power. I don't know enough about the Light. I need to train, to learn, without distraction. Without painting a target on your backs by having these texts."

Rey has never told a lie this big before and Kylo sees it, can smell it on her, and for an instant her control falters again and he's back, standing now, behind her, leaning close. She can't see him but she can  _ feel _ him, his blazing heat, his body, his burning heart. She can feel his breath as he whispers in her ear.

"Deception is a tool of the Dark Side, you know."

She shuts him out and only then allows herself to remember:  _ yes, it is. _

Leia inspects the girl before her and Rey feels, for a moment, flayed--laid bare, as if she can see her fallen son looming darkly over Rey's shoulder. "You’re not a weapon. Not to me."

It’s too close to Ben’s-- _ Kylo’s _ \--words. "I'm the only weapon you have. Only a Jedi can fight the Dark Side. You know that better than anyone." 

Which isn't really even a lie at all.

The General's face goes grim, her mouth a thin line. Rey can't tell if Leia agrees with the logic of the lie or if she can tell that Rey wouldn't be asking if it weren't necessary or if she knows that Rey is useless or worse right now. “You won’t be put off this.” But she nods her assent. "All right. You have a month."

Rey lets out the breath she's been holding.

\--

The Falcon goes through a few minor panics, a few near-misses: sometimes Rey is called upon to work on the ship's idiosyncrasies to fill in the staffing gaps lost in the decimation of their forces; on the Outer Rim they find a base and much of the crew departs; it doesn't matter. She pushes past Kylo or Ben or whomever he is when he interrupts. It's not the task at hand.

Without Snoke managing the bond it's gone wild, constant, exhausting. Once opened, the blast door must constantly be held shut with nothing but their own combined strength. Without each of them actively blocking the other out, the space between them becomes meaningless. All her energies must go toward shutting him out.

It continues to worsen, though. Kylo himself may disappear but his surroundings begin to creep in. One wall of the Millenium Falcon goes a glossy black for half a day and she can't look at it. She walks right into a wall where she--or he--can see a shimmering hallway.

She wonders what  _ he _ must be seeing. She's sure it's worse for him, laden as it must be with a lifetime of bad memories. But if it hurts, it's a pain he deserves . She can't sit in the pilot's seat anymore, the stars shift, go wrong. Even if she could read the texts, at this point, she wouldn't be able to. The characters swim before her eyes.

And the worst part is, the pattern increasingly turns toward their schedules coinciding, as if even with the door shut they experience magnetic attraction, a certain bizarre gravity, which means their weakest moments constantly brush against each other. They wake and sleep in sync no matter how Rey tries to fight it. Hunger drifts across the expanse like an irresistible scent. There's one experience in the showers where they both require release and, at its apex, neither is alone--

Rey has never learned the shame of sex, but Ben has, and there’s more than enough of it for them both. She does not seek release after that.

As the sanctified last Jedi, the miracle worker who allowed the remnants of the resistance to escape, Rey is allowed privacy. It's the only blessing, as the ancient Jedi texts don't offer much and they're devilishly difficult to work with, even with the droid’s help and, once she grows nervous about relying on a droid who can be stolen or persuaded, a speaking translation device.

It's the worst lie she told to Leia: there's no power in them, no secrets, nothing; just stories of balance and meditation and peace and light and it's all so  _ useless _ .

But it comes back to her, why she's doing this. Finn said that Rose told him that is how we're going to win this war. Not by destroying what they hate, but saving what they love.

And waking up with a stranger's warm and insistent arm grown familiar and wrapped tight, a physical pressure around her middle in sleep, Rey knows what she loves. Rey knows what she she is willing to destroy. There is a way to save both the Resistance and Ben Solo from Kylo Ren.

Rey knows what price she's willing to pay for it.


	2. 2

The temple on Ach-to is burned, which seems a bad sign, but Finn sees nothing but a burnt-out tree and Rey thinks slowly:  _ another lie is not so much. _ And the first lie had brought her all of this bounty.

Leia trusts Rey's promises, and has better things to worry about now that the effort to rebuild the resistance is in full swing--she has bigger things to lose. One Force user and one junkheap of a ship, no matter how strangely enduring, no matter how auspicious to the Rebels, will not make the difference now in the war. But it may someday, and that's where Leia's faith lies. The rest of the rebels are established, taking on supplies, buying ships, playing politics.

"Do you trust me?" she asks Finn.

"Yeah, I trust you," Finn says, but there's suspicion. "Why?"

"Do you trust that I can make the Force do what I want?"

"I mean, you lifted all those rocks--"

"This is bigger than rocks. This is about shifting balance of power and winning the war."

It's horrible to ask this of him. It's a betrayal, or it will be. She doesn't know anything for sure and she's terrified but someone has to be there, someone who can communicate with the outside world, someone to stop her if she's too far gone, if she fails, if it all goes wrong.

Before Crait, Finn might have shrugged, followed orders, not asked--it was for a friend, a comrade, and for the old Finn that would have been enough. Now he raises an eyebrow. "I still don't see how we can help the rebellion from here."

“Jedi turn the tides of war. A fully trained Jedi can manipulate probability, can shift--everything. There’s a reason why the First Order and the Empire before it tried to exterminate the Jedi.” The less Finn knows, the safer her mission will be--the explicit one, and the secret one Rey has only kept to herself. “This is a place of power for the Jedi. For me.”

It all sounds so much braver than she feels.

\--

The first thing they do is build the cage. It's mostly Finn's creation, built on what they can scrap together and using his technical knowledge from the First Order and her gleaned knowledge from old Empire holding cells meant for the kind of thing she is looking to contain. They build in that dark place of power, the cave below the temple where no light can find it except for a few moments at sunrise when the light streams in from over the hill.

When they're finished, he asked, "Who is it for?"

"Kylo Ren," she says. 

And it's not exactly a lie.

\--

Rey thinks of it as an assassination.

Kylo Ren is the Supreme Leader. He leads the empire in the vision of Darth Vader and Snoke and all the autocrats before him. It's not a game Rey understands but it's one she has felt the violent impact of; she spent most of her life scavenging through the fallout of the war fought by empire and rebel. The only thing more common than the scrap there were the skeletons.

But she does not need to know how to machine a motivator from cold steel to know how to scrape rust from it. She does not need to know how to craft a lightsaber from a kyber crystal to wield it. And she does not need to understand Kylo Ren to turn him, not anymore.

Snoke's words echo through her mind:  _ Darkness rises, and light to meet it. _

It's as if the Force has a mind of its own, a mind that seeks balance more than anything else. The Jedi texts reinforce this, bizarrely enough. Luke refused the call of light; when he accepted it, he died within the same cycle Snoke did. Ben Solo--the monster Kylo Ren--refused the call of light, thinking himself beyond light and dark even as he held both in his grasp.

And Rey herself had refused the call of darkness, placing them both in balance.

He will not walk willingly into the light. She knows that with a certainty that stops the breath in her lungs. But the Force does not have mercy, does not take sides; if one of them were to die, the other would surely come soon after.

And if one of them were to shift allegiances, the Force would raise another to meet them. Perhaps another child, perhaps a new generation, or--

Rey is a scavenger; broken things are all she has ever known. She has always been able to fix them once she understood them. And Ben Solo is a broken thing. Conflicted even now in his seat of power, in his victory. She can feel it in him, taste it in the back of her throat like blood every time his presence darkens the sky and turns the ground beneath her feet to tile and ash. That conflict fuels his power, it makes him dangerous, but it also means there might be an easier path.

Nature tends to take the easiest course. Sand flows down the dune and water fills the cup you put it in.

If Rey herself were to fall willingly to the Dark--

If Rey herself followed the call--

What could the Force do, then, but drag him into the Light?

\--

It takes forever to do so much as lift a pebble.

Sith teachings are, by necessity, a shadow of the Jedi ones, identifiable in the negative, as an absence. She thinks of the texts describing the Force like a half-picked over star destroyer. There is enough there to understand what the whole looked like, once; to understand the schematic to what is missing. Once she understands that, it's easy. Where the Jedi texts advocate for detachment, for cutting away emotion--even love--the Sith would bind a padawan to their feelings, especially negative ones. Where the Jedi would have a padawan rely on inner peace to base their power, the Sith would rely on inner turmoil, on unending rage. The stronger the rage, the stronger the Sith. And so on.

Reading the texts it becomes clear how she was drawn to the light: her hope her parents would return to Jakku is buoyant, whole, perfect as a child's belief has to be. It sustains acts of the Force without complaint.

Hate comes just as naturally, and from the same place. It rises from what he told her, from who she is and how she has been treated and all the petty cruelty as aftermath: the starvation, the disregard, the vain child's belief that anyone was ever going to come back for something as worthless as  _ her _ .

When the pebble finally lifts, trembling, from the earth, it leaves her panting and red-faced, and beyond it she finally sees him: just sitting there, watching.

The pebble falls to the dirt and she lets out a breath. She hadn't even felt him there, this time. No way to know how long he's been watching her try, she's been so focused. The earth beneath them both is overlaid in a broad, jagged path with a glossy black floor of what must be a First Order Ship.

"What are you doing?" he asks, in that plain and guileless tone, that voice that seems to echo from everywhere and nowhere and wrap her up--

She concentrates, and he's gone, and the earth is earth once more. 

For now.

No wonder Kylo looks that way all the time, as if he's just been kicked in the chest. Every time he touches the Force, it must be excruciating. Every time he talks to her, he's touching the Force.

Rey wonders if it gets better, over time. 

\--

It doesn't.

Time does pass, at least. But the pain does not.

The third time she lifts Luke’s X-wing out of the sea, she manages to place it atop a stable rock formation and Finn comes running because she's screaming and she hasn't even realized.

"What's wrong?"

She's panting, throat raw, and all she wants to do is lash out at him, he's an  _ idiot, _ doesn't he understand what she's going through?

And behind him stands Ben Solo, holding a sparring sword, deflecting something and then, as he hears her breath, turning on his heel, whirling for another strike, and then he sights her--

He holds up his hand to stop his attackers, invisible as they are, and watches. He must know what she is doing, he can’t know but he must see it. She grits her teeth and tears away from him.

"Sorry," she says to Finn. "Just practicing." Her smile comes out wrong, thin, and Finn clearly doesn't trust it.

The Dark Side is nothing but agony. But perhaps, over time, she can grow used to it--

\--

She doesn't.

The only way to summon the power is through the pain. Through truly, deeply feeling it.

It explains everything. It solves nothing.

But this is the choice she has made. There is nowhere to go but through it.

\---

There is a red star in the sky. From the cage, it’s the only star she can see, so bright, hanging in the morning sky like a beacon. Like a threat.

What seems like a lifetime ago, in that interrogation chamber, Kylo Ren said, "Don't be afraid. I feel it too."

Rey had thought he had meant the nascent connection between them, or the strength of the Force inside of her. Until now. Now, she thinks he was referring to the pain he inflicted--to inflict it, he had to feel it too.

He has felt every inch of agony he has inflicted on others. It doesn't forgive anything, but it does shed light. Which she understands during her morning meditations, but is underscored when Finn shoves a bowl of porridge through the bars of the cage and walks away without another word.

Rey opens her mouth and then closes it, puzzled. Finally, just as he’s about to ascend the ladder, she shouts, “Are you all right?”

He stops, one foot already up. The shoulders slump, and he comes back. He doesn’t meet her eyes. “Poe’s hurt,” Finn says, and the way he says it tells her exactly the measure of what is in danger. “He might die.”

Rey draws a sharp breath. 

“There was a fight,” he goes on. “Above--some planet. I don’t remember. They surprised us.” His eyes are red but he scrubs his hand across them anyway. “The Supreme Leader was there himself, he took out--more X-wings than I can count. Poe was in open space for … for too long. He was injured in the explosion, and then--”

The Supreme Leader. Kylo Ren.  _ Ben. _ The man she is trying to save, the monster she is trying to destroy.

Knowing that, she can’t console him. Not now, not here, not like this with the world around her shattered into shards of the island and pieces of a spaceship shifting kaleidoscope and the bitter taste of a man she hates more than anyone else in the galaxy seething at the back of her throat. “Finn--”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Rey. I just want to be left alone.” And he leaves, the door to the cage swinging. Which is worse.

When she steps out, she wants to hit something. Her fingers find her staff. She turns and finds a wall--that glassy surface might be the cave or the Supremacy or might be Kylo’s own TIE Silencer, she can hardly tell anymore--and begins to hack at it, relentlessly. Without the lightsaber it’s just raw violence, stone chips spraying from each impact with her own muscle and with the Force.

Her hands are blistered by the time it all goes silent. She knows he’s here because she can’t hear the spray of stone chips hit the floor.

He doesn’t say her name this time.

“You may have killed my friend,” she shouts, turning her face but not her eyes over her shoulder. She wants to sound brave but she just sounds like she’s about to cry. “I hope you’re happy.”

“I kill Rebels. I don’t know what you expected.”

“Rebels? Rebels against what, I wonder? The Republic government--”

“The Republic was a joke. It could barely hold together a system, let alone a galaxy. The civil wars alone were so costly as to decimate entire systems.” His lips close and his mouth tenses silently for a moment, as if he is trying to shape his next words on his tongue. “The galaxy needs discipline. Force. Order.”

He knows more than her about politics, about history, about everything, and it’s not why she’s angry. This isn’t a political debate, in the end. She whirls, staff still in hand. “The galaxy needs less of you.” She advances on him, stalking like a predator. “Less murderers. Fewer men willing to kill my friends, to kill their own fathers, who would even kill men like Snoke, the creature who made you into--this.”

“Do you know why I was able to do it?” He hasn’t moved an inch and his face is bloodless, passionless, utterly empty. “Because I have the strength to do it.”

“Murder isn’t power,” she says. “It’s just death.”

He lifts his chin. “Then what are you doing to that wall?”

She swings the staff, but he disappears just before it connects.


	3. 3

There is a sound inside of Rey, like the whine of an engine at the back of her mind, a loose motivator, cracked transperisteel on a ship in hyperspace. It had come so gradually, like a persistent pain, but now she cannot ignore it. It threatens every waking moment and haunts her dreams.

She names it  _ Kylo Ren. _

The bond, the thing connecting them, isn’t like a cable, isn’t a filament or a tunnel or a passageway that can be open or shut. It isn’t tubing that can be pinched off or torn open or poked full of holes. It is a sixth sense, tied to the way they each touch the Force. They are both trapped in it, like a darkened room, and sometimes, when they can’t help it, they stumble into each other and touch. 

Rey can try to pull away from it, from the bond, from  _ him _ , but it wounds her. It separates her from the Force, and from both the Light side, which she is familiar with, and the Dark side that she is trying to desperately to learn. 

Which means pushing Kylo Ren away is hindering the mission. She can’t just push or fight or close herself off. She has to be stronger than it. Stronger than him. Stronger than every bit of torture or mercy, stronger than the Jedi teachings and the Sith, strong as the Force itself that traps them together.

Finn brings her food on a schedule that marks time for her when she can’t. She sleeps, sometimes; she assumes Finn does too, somewhere else, probably on a better schedule.  Most mornings, she wakes before Finn does, and she does it with the pressure of an arm wrapped tight around her middle. She has no idea what it would look like to Finn if he were to see it. Would he see Kylo? Would he see nothing? Would he sense it, the way she can, in the way all the air goes still like the very galaxy itself is holding its breath?

The suns trace their arcs across the sky, chased by the moon, which she mostly sees through the hole in the roof of the cage. Kylo watches her, sometimes, the light falling through him, the dust on his gloves from other places he has been that she has not, the dirt on his boots too anonymous to identify. 

She isn’t pushing him away anymore, but Kylo does it, sometimes. He has duties as Supreme Leader and must say things a rebel like her can’t hear. She doesn’t try to make excuses for it, but it’s so easy. When he’s there, he just watches, gaze as strong as the heat on the back of her neck, with that half-starved look that he must think she doesn’t see,.

Rey knows something about hunger. He looks like a man who’s been well-fed his entire life. He’s strong, and not just in the Force; they didn’t make men with strength like that on Jakku. No, Kylo Ren has never known real hunger. But Rey knows how deep hunger really goes.

Perhaps Ben Solo does too.

It takes weeks for her to admit the truth: that she can lift an x-wing or a rock or practice lightsaber forms or meditate on the dark heart of her desires all she wants, but her task isn’t moving  _ him _ at all, not in any way that she can see. There’s no sign that Kylo--that  _ Ben-- _ has moved or changed at all. When he talks, it’s to taunt. More often they brush past and through each other.

Which means she is failing. Which means she isn’t doing enough.

She needs something more.

-

Being trapped on an alien planet with your best--first--only?--friend was less fun than it sounded. Rey was training nonstop, dawn til dusk. Finn knew some of what she was doing; something complicated, something with the Force that she couldn’t explain but General Organa had approved. After weeks of sprinting, defection, more sprinting, rescues, being rescued, not to mention multiple near-death experiences, Finn thought he would enjoy some time to relax, even if Rey was preoccupied.

He didn’t. He  _ hated _ it. There was nothing to do on Ahch-to and the caretakers wouldn’t even let him clean anything; they chattered about him doing it wrong in their weird fish-language that he could only understand about half of. Finn had been a sharpshooter and a janitor both, and they could not have been more insulting if they had insulted his marksmanship. 

Which only left one job. Help Rey, if he could. So far it seemed like he couldn’t. Rey was in her own world, so deep in Jedi texts and meditation and the Force that he couldn’t begin to follow her even when they did talk--and they didn’t. Not really. He would catch her staring past him, over his shoulder, like she was seeing something he couldn’t. Which was annoying, but if he could help by letting her be and chattering at her while she didn’t listen over meals, then he would leave her be.

On the Falcon he had been forced to find time to debrief with Resistance leadership. Now, the Wookie was gone to recruit his kind on a ship that Kashyyk wouldn't shoot out of the sky, and he and Rey were alone on the little out of the way planet. The only thing Finn could think of that could possibly be useful was the First Order facts that sat in his brain. And maybe--maybe Poe and Rose and the rest would be happy to hear from him even if he didn’t have any First Order secrets.

So he wrote messages. The notes were bounced between cloaked locator to cloaked dish to a mobile beacon, back to cloaked dish, and eventually to the Resistance. It took a long time that way, but it was secure. He wrote out everything he could remember from Starkiller and the Supremacy, in hopes that part of those plans would be carried over into new projects. He wrote about the stormtrooper training, and how to--potentially--broadcast messages into the legions and what messages might actually change the way stormtroopers thought and acted.

Then he started to get messages back--messages sent days after they had entered hyperspace, messages from Poe, from Rose, from others in the Resistance. They didn’t want to hear about his past, the First Order, the guts of war. They wanted to hear about  _ him. _ What he was doing, how it was going.

He couldn’t tell anyone anything--Rey’s mission was a secret, halfway a secret even from Finn himself--so instead he wrote of everything that amazed him: the food, not grown spaceship-uniform but lumpy, ugly, sometimes too sour or overripe and sweet, unprocessed, imperfect, wonderful. The caretakers who kept the huts and the island and the burned-out temple that he started to recognize, started to see as individuals: the old one he called The General who looked at him with the same indulgence General Organa did, who the rest all flocked to throughout the day; the young one who washed his clothes and wouldn’t let him help; the surly cook; the despairing repairman who looked at Rey with exasperation every time she destroyed something new. He wrote of the air that changed by the day, by the hour, one moment full of frozen lashing storms and the next clear and warm and wet. It was getting colder, he knew, but most days were drenched in sunshine--real sunshine.

Rose could say everything, though. She had started writing the second the Falcon had leapt away from their new ship, an old retrofitted Clone Wars troop carrier that was less likely to rattle to pieces like the Falcon. She wrote every day after, telling him everything, every moment, introducing him to everyone as if he had been there.

At least, that had been her plan. The letters had arrived one after the other when they had come out of hyperspace, and then stopped altogether a few days in. Then, the clinical and cold war report: somewhere halfway between Mandalore and Kashyyk, that they had stumbled on the First Order squadron.

A First Order squadron led by the Imperator Ren himself.

He had hoped, somehow, Rey would see it, that she’d pluck it straight from his head and comfort him. Instead he had heard Rey screaming with the effort of lifting an x-wing from the ocean. He had run to her like he couldn’t lose another friend and she had spun on him like she was contemplating murder.

So he hadn’t said anything. He had let her be, let her focus on her studies, whatever it was she was doing. Given her a few long days of work--he can’t mistake it, she  _ is _ working, he hasn’t been a stormtrooper his whole life without the ability to recognize work he doesn’t understand as still being  _ work _ \--and then she had noticed, and it had slipped out. He hadn’t wanted it to. And she had looked at him like she did it herself.

It didn’t sit right, that look on her face. She didn’t do it. She had been here the whole time, with only Finn for company. Hadn’t she?

But she said the cage was for Kylo Ren. A man who was so far away he was killing their friends and it took weeks for Funn to even know about it. And they had built a cage  _ here. _

Reports keep flowing back and, according to her request, he doesn’t tell her anything about the war, about who they lost and what was left of the Resistance. He only talks about Poe, who was doing as well as could be expected. Finn didn’t say anything about her in his reports back either, which was according to her wishes. It was safer that way, she said. 

Finn only just now wonders for who.

-

Finn is receiving--and giving--his full reports for the week, which means he’ll be busy in the Falcon until the sunlight starts to wane. It’s the opportunity Rey has been waiting for. 

Crosslegged, in the cage, trying to silence the turmoil inside of her, trying not to just not push him away--trying, now, to reach out, to find him, to pull him toward her, eyes closed and trying less to think and more to be.

It’s easier than she thought it might be. Her palms go cold and her breath hitches when that silence falls, when she can feel the warm weight of him across from her. Her eyes flicker open and she looks into his face and tries to find a steady, throbbing center of herself, tries to tie herself to it, tries to hold steady in the face of him. 

It only sort of works.

"I was wondering when you'd try to talk," he says finally.

"I don’t want to talk."

“Yes you do.” He says it so calmly, so evenly, and it infuriates her that he can have such peace when she, the supposed Jedi, can’t seem to grasp it. “You reached. I felt it.”

“Maybe I wanted to kill you.” It goes unsaid, but he hears it:  _ if we can touch, then-- _

“You shot me. It didn’t work,” he says, biting off the last word with a grim finality, almost singed with regret.

That gives her pause. Rey had reached. She had wanted to talk. Everything just gets so completely mixed up when he’s  _ here, _ in front of her. “You wanted me to shoot you, but you couldn’t let me have the lightsaber?”

His eyes focus past her, slightly, for just a moment, as if he’s looking for something in the air around her--a thought of her own that he could pluck from the air like a bird. “You still have it.” It’s not a question.

She looks away, and then back again, quick, afraid he'll disappear even though she's the one pushing him away, half out of instinct and discomfort. They’re words he’s stuffed down, words that he’s wanted to say, she can feel them struggling their way out. Let him have them.

He’s still watching her, and he speaks again when she doesn’t, as if he’s hungry to hear her say more. "You're training to be a Jedi still. How? There's no one left to teach you. We made sure of that."

“I'm not telling you anything, so quit asking.” Something twitches under the skin of his face, shifting the scar she gave him. "You said I needed a teacher."

"You do."

"Then teach me."

It starts at his eyes, which go wide. His lips part. She can almost feel the breath he’s drawing, can’t hear the questions in his throat but can feel them moving. And then it all goes very still and hot and all the questions struggle and die as he smothers them, as he misunderstands--half-deliberately--what she’s asking for.

He says, “I can’t.”

Said like that, it sounds like a refusal--not what she wanted, not what she had hoped. But spending so much time now not pushing him away, she can see what he really means, the difference between what he thinks she’s asking for and what she’s asking for. “I know you’re not a Jedi.” Rey swallows. “I don’t want to be a Jedi.”

He hears what she really means, too, eyes flickering across her face:  _ I don’t think I can ever be a Jedi.  _ He draws another breath, a thing she feels moving in her own chest.

Then he removes his glove and lays it over his knee. The hand he offers is bare. Too much, and not enough.

“No,” she says, startled. No, doing that, he could take too much, he could see her real goal. “I want to learn the way you did.”

“You don’t,” he says. A flash, an image, he’s sitting so close it comes without touching him: his scars layered upon scars until the body goes shining pink and stops betraying you. Anger so hot it could burn right through your chest and pain so deep no lightsaber could slice it free.

It hurts to see even this wisp of it. And it makes her angry--not with him, though that’s where she points it. “I’m not weak. You think I’m just a scavenger? That I’ll just steal whatever I need from you?”

“Sith students kill their masters,” he--Kylo, Kylo Ren, master of the Knights of Ren, says to her, his pupil. That’s how he’s thinking of her, she can see it. No, he doesn’t worry about her stealing--but there are things she can give, things he wants, things--the thought cuts off abruptly, before it can even form, let alone let Rey catch hold of it. He still has more control than she does, even if he doesn’t know it. “I told you I was a monster and you came anyway."

“I thought I could turn you.” It’s bitter as tabac.

Just as bitter when he says it. “We both hoped.”

She looks at his bare hand, resting curled on his knee. It’s large and blunt, calloused from holding the hilt of a sword. It’s still there, ungloved, waiting. As if feeling her gaze brush his fingertips, they twitch. He swallows down the discomfort.

Rey takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and then offers her own hand.

Walking through Kylo Ren’s memories of training is strange, this time, from the outside.

He tries to shield her from the moments, tries to only offer the lessons and not the learning of them, the same way she is trying so desperately to only offer memories she can afford to give away. 

But bits slip through. The first time he took a life. The second. How it was nothing, and then a surge of guilt, turned to power for the one after, and the one after. Blood on blood. How to turn the blade just so to wound; just so to kill. She had gotten that from him; the scar is proof of it. To scar is better than to kill, sometimes, when an adversary is different. The way to control another person with the scar, or with the power of the Force. The way to tell them what they would do and make them do it. The mind trick. The brittle power in pain. The greater strength in anger, in fear. How much he feared how much he leaned on pain. How so many of the others--oh, the others, he tries to keep them from her but she sees them out of the corners of his eyes--the others had found a dark and violent joy in it and how hard he had tried to hold onto wisps of that malicious glee where he could find them. How all it left him was a ringing silence, a great and terrible emptiness that could never be collapsed.

What she gives: sleeplessness. Long nights. The sun. The boy she stole food from, when she was too young to know what it meant. And kept stealing from, when she knew it was for his little sister. The skull she had kicked aside to get at the next piece of the scrapped ship, how it hadn’t been the boy’s or his sister’s but someone else’s, someone she still didn’t care about, someone she didn’t have room in hear heart for. How she had never been afraid of the bones, had never wondered how haunted these dead places where she scavenged might be. The only hungry ghost was herself.

It lasts a hundred years, or a moment. No one interrupts, this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know it's bad when you're procrastinating on your _other_ thing by posting on your _other other_ half-abandoned thing. 
> 
> But I Need To Finish This Before Episode IX Comes Out. that's the gameplan.
> 
> come hang out on [tumblr](https://we-built-the-shadows-here.tumblr.com/) & [twitter](https://twitter.com/built_shadows) if you wanna yell about stuff.


End file.
